Use a heavy duty battery charger instead of running your car to update?

I find myself spending sometime in the car messing with things and I think its a bad Idea to idle the car plus it wastes gas. I could always run a separate psu for ac current and run an extension cord but thats no good if I want to listen to music while i do it becuase of the amps.

So I was at a stereo shop with some friends becuse he wanted speakers. I noticed they had the music up for testing a customers car and they had a heavy duty charger for the car. I am thinking of going that route becuase it was basicly a heavy duty hyper charger for the car.

I do that in my shop all the time..... just be carful not to overcharge the battery continously... just touch the side... if shes getting very warm give it a brake for a while by switching down from high to medium.....

This would work fine:http://www.sears.com/sr/javasr/produ...ers+%26+Cables
You can leave it connected without any problems. I have a similar one that I just set to 2A and it stops when the battery is full. While the PC is on, it supplies power, then shuts off a few seconds after the PC goes off.

if it's just pc, then that would do.... if your talking about amps & screens going & accessory turned on for a while, then a larger charger is more suitable... depends on the load.... also a bigger charger can always be turned down, but a small one can't be turned up....

Whoa! Using a 200A manual charger to run a car PC for possibly several hours? Do you have full coverage? Seriously, that's way too much if you were to forget it once or even while running the PC since it doesn't even have overcharge protection.

You wouldn't want to connect an alternator directly without a batt either. The charger I have I got from AutoZone (like the above one I linked) has less noise than the alternator on the lowest setting. The higher settings get worse, but I never need them. The 2A outputs around 4. There's a 12A rapid charge and a 75A jump start. You don't use the highest setting on these for charging and they are not automatic. The reason I use 2A is because of the low noise and it just keeps the batt charged while the PC, LCD, amps all fluctuate between 3 and 9A. Usually 3-4 with nothing going on, so the batt and cables barely get warm.